Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has brought down the world's largest spam network, Rustock.

Rustock, at its peak, was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft's wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%.

Rustock was taken down, piece by piece, in a similar way to the Mega-D botnet. First the master controllers, the...

Microsoft announced Tuesday that Windows XP will "live to die another day" in a curious drama where the operating system was scheduled to expire over 2 years ago. The previous release of the seriously "bugged out" Windows Vista has propelled XP in to another life cycle.

Nowadays most of the consumer Windows users are either using the new Windows 7 platform or are in the process of upgrading to it. Even those that lived out the dreadful Windows Vista start (and fall on face) have...